Category Archives: Hunt, Sir Timothy

petty Balkan obsessions, each anxious to impose its own orthodoxy by the same methods of intimidation. An increasing number of subjects are off-limits to the wary; pressure groups long ago realised that you don’t have to go in for the crudity of Islamic fatwa and the Charlie Hebdo killings to exclude unwanted commentary.

Who after the dismissal of Professor Sir Timothy Hunt

by the cowards and poltroons of University College, London, terrorised as they were by the National Union of Harridans, would dare to repeat his sentiments in public, even as a joke? If a Nobel prize doesn’t protect a man from a witch-hunt, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Freedom of expression and opinion is

a habit of the heart and a discipline, a willing suspension of outrage towards those with whom we disagree, however strongly. I say (including to myself because, alas, it is often necessary to do so), control your rage.

When a Nobel prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist self-criticism.

What was Professor Sir Timothy Hunt’s wrongdoing? During a speech at a luncheon for women scientists, he remarked lightly, ironically,

Self-criticism

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls…things happen when they are in the lab…You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.

Hunted down

Such is the modern thirst, writes Dalrymple,

for moral or political outrage, which is the tool of the mediocre to bring about their revenge upon the gifted, that words are now taken in the most literal sense and given thereby the worst possible interpretation. The mediocre wait to take offence as a spider awaits its prey in a web; the spider needs its prey to live, the mediocre their offendedness to feel a sense of purpose to their lives.

Struggle session

Red guards of the internet

Professor Hunt was forced to resign

by what in effect was a witch hunt, or a lynch mob.

Dalrymple points out that

science doesn’t need women, it needs scientists, just as art needs artists and literature needs writers; whether they are men or women is irrelevant. There is no female science any more than there was Jewish or bourgeois science, of late unhappy memory.

Heresy

It is not truth

that is the aim, but power. That is the purpose of propaganda in totalitarian regimes: to force starving people to acquiesce to the proposition that they have never eaten so well.

It is

a totalitarian demand that a cell biologist, in order to be able to work at all, should subscribe to the current political orthodoxy, whether it be right or wrong. It is constitutive of these times in which diversity is claimed as the highest good that there should exist a demand that everyone should think alike or at least not utter heresies in public.

It is not enough, writes Dalrymple, that Professor Sir Timothy Hunt should have been forced to resign from

that great centre of disinterested enquiry,

University College, London, for having

drawn attention to the fact that women tend to cry more than men.

Much more should be done to make an example of this monster after the enormity he has perpetrated. For a start, Dalrymple believes, all Hunt’s papers

should be expunged from the scientific record as if he had never existed.

He should also at the very least, says Dalrymple, be

expelled from the Royal Society

dispossessed of his knighthood

deprived of his British citizenship

disfranchised

stripped of the Nobel prize

Only by these means, says Dalrymple, and by certain more severe penalties (one looks for inspiration to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when they knew what to do with this kind of professors),

can the terrible damage he did when speaking to the press in Korea be repaired.

Struggle sessions with leading feminists, and wholesale re-education, are necessary.